What the Spellchecker Saw is an occasional series of posts in which I examine the contents of writers’ spellcheckers. Specifically, I look at their custom dictionaries, or the words they’ve added in the course of writing a particular book. This may sound unpromising, but as I tried to explain in my original post, these word lists are fascinating artefacts of the creative process; they offer, I think, a uniquely revealing insight into a writer’s language and ways of thinking.
Following Sarah Perry’s guest appearance in the last post, I’m delighted to have a new word list from another extraordinary writer to pore over. Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, which was published to great acclaim in January, is both a memoir of addiction and homecoming and an illuminating study of our complex relationships with the natural world.
I reviewed The Outrun for The Irish Times, and praised it for the humaneness and candour of its account of addiction and recovery. What I admired most, though, was not so much its sense of place – a description that seems inadequate in this instance – but rather its primacy of place. Although Amy’s return to Orkney is central to her recovery, it is no mere backdrop. She is concerned with the personal significance of place, but is also deeply preoccupied with its physical constitution, with the substance and topology of her Orkney home and with the forces of all kinds – geological, climatic, economic – that act on it.
The Orkney of The Outrun, then, is both a childhood home (with all the attendant emotional complexity) an immense laboratory of personal discovery. This gives the book both an emotional rootedness and an exhilarating intellectual range. Both are discernible, I think, in Amy’s absorbing word list. In words like rockpools and beachcombing, we glimpse the island home she ranged over as a child, while cartological and the splendidly exotic islomaniacs hint at her later fascination with mapping its shape and extent.
There is evidence, too, in words like moonbows, of Amy’s interest in astronomical and atmospheric phenomena, and of a curiosity that extends to the migratory patterns of birds (geolocators), to plate tectonics (faultline, though it may serve a metaphorical purpose, occurs here in a refreshingly literal sense) and to marine biology (the magnificent hydromedusae, among my personal favourites from this list, refers to a subclass of aquatic invertebrates).
These are fascinating specimens, and very much in the spirit of the book, but perhaps the richest of this list’s treasures are in its lavish scattering of Orcadian dialect. In previous posts on this subject, I’ve mentioned the intriguing way in which these custom dictionaries seem to capture the essence of a writer’s individual habits of language. In this case, Amy’s idiolect is enriched by the language of Orkney, itself a fascinating confluence of Scots English and Norn, the North Germanic language that was spoken there until the 15th century.
These are words to be savoured for their sounds alone, but for most of us they do necessitate a glossary. One is provided at the beginning of The Outrun, and I’ve reproduced some of those definitions here. If you haven’t read the book already, you may well find (as I did) that these words – the glint and heft of them, their commanding and incantatory beauty – are all the invitation you need.
haar: sea fog
hillyans: mythical hill folk
holm: offshore islet
kye: cattle
lum: chimney
muckle: big
noust: hollow for storing small boats
peedie: small
selkie: seal
spoot: razor clam
teeick: lapwing
tystie: black guillemot
Paraic O’Donnell 